touchpad locking on ubuntu 11.04

After upgrading an Asus Eee1005 from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04, the touchpad would occasionally lock up shortly after logging in. After a while I realized the locking would occur only when I started typing something; it was fine as long as I kept using the mouse only. The culprit was that I was running syndaemon on session startup to disable the touchpad while typing; somehow it failed to re-enable the touchpad after I stopped typing. Removing syndaemon from startup fixed the issue.